Spectre: A Rewrite
by Starships and Stopwatches
Summary: 00Q. Basically a rewrite of Spectre based off of an unused scene in an early draft of the script.
1. After the Chase

Bond heard the snow crunch under his feet as stepped out of the wreckage. Trying to ignore the sharp pain in his abdomen, he sighed quietly and glanced around him. A preliminary scan of his surroundings registered a quiet sort of chaos. Debris had flown everywhere. Flames snaked out of the windows of tipped cars, providing a violent contrast to the would-be peaceful landscape. Working purely off of excess adrenaline from the chase that had concluded only seconds before, Bond tiredly picked up a jog towards one of the cars. Looking inside, he expected to see a familiar face. But he was only met with disappointment and frustration when he found the car empty and blood coating the leather of the backseat.

"Shit," Bond whispered, "There goes my only lead."

Slowly picking himself up from where he had been leaning against the car door, he decided to take a longer, more attentive look at his environment. There wasn't much to see; excluding the broken remains and the plane, of course. Without its wings or its tail, it looked more like a glorified bobsled been a military-grade BN 2 Islander.

Bond took a deep breath, feeling the adrenaline finally leave him. The cold air around him seemed to chill him to the bone, and he began to wish he had brought a bigger coat. His thin fleece jacket just wasn't doing the job anymore, and he knew he should get to a place with, at most, a decent heater. Immediately, Q came to mind. He was probably sitting at the desk in his hotel room, warm and comfortable. Everything Bond was not.

He decided that meeting up with Q in his probably toasty hotel room was in his best interest at that moment, because getting hypothermia while trying to save the world is quite an inconvenience. So, taking one last look at the mess he left behind (and saying a mental sorry to the person who's barn he had left a strangely plane-shaped hole in), He shoved his hands in his pocket and prepared for the long walk back to civilization.


	2. Hotel Horatio

The trek back to the clinic took hours, and Bond could feel the cold arctic wind beginning to take its toll. His body tremored as he shivered, his muscles trying desperately to keep warm. His legs and feet were sore from walking, and he was exhausted from the events that had occurred earlier that day. Relief finally came when he sat in the gondola leading away from the clinic and back to the small town below. After the short few minutes of rest, he stood reluctantly when the gondola reach the end of the track and followed the group of skiers he had shared the small space with out into the lodge. Now, all he had to do was find out where the hell this Hotel Horatio was.  
"Entschuldigung, wo ist Hotel Horatio?" he asked the pale man standing at the front desk.  
"Es ist weiß Straßen von hier. Gehen aus der Tür und gehen abbiegen," the man replied, his eyes not even looking up from his work.  
"Danke," Bond said before heading out of the lodge and back into the cold Austrian air. His breath formed clouds of water droplets before him, and the familiar beginnings of shivers hit him once again. But in what seemed like the blink of an eye compared to the long journey he had made earlier that day, he found himself standing on the front steps of the small Hotel Horatio.  
Upon opening the door, Bond's first impression of the hotel was that it seemed quite homely. The old lamps with colorful glass shades sitting low on antique furniture gave the hotel a sort of comforting atmosphere. But as peaceful and quiet as the hotel seemed, Bond still felt as if something was wrong. Deciding that it was only the exhaustion and effects of the cold talking, he brushed the feeling off as nothing and decided to start the search for room twelve.  
It took him only a few minutes to find the hallway where Q's room was located, and he counted the rooms out loud as he walked down the corridor. "Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and…" When approached the door of room twelve, the same feeling of dread returned as quickly as it had gone. Though this time, Bond could have sworn he felt his stomach drop when he saw the cause of it. The door of room twelve was slightly ajar, and it swung ominously open when Bond gave it a small testing push.  
He pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and cautiously entered the room. The room felt much different to Bond than the rest of the hotel. A unnerving chill filled the air around him as he walked through the threshold. He followed the slight breeze with his eyes back to its source. Moving towards the other side of the room, he saw that the window had been shattered, the broken glass littering the ground around it. A trail of blood led Bond back across the room to the bathroom, where he saw the door had seemingly been ripped violently off its hinges. Inside the small bathroom, he found Q's laptop sitting unceremoniously in the sink, destroyed. He guessed Q had sabotaged it himself in an attempt to keep sensitive information, most likely Bond's location, away from his kidnappers. Bond let his arms fall to his sides as a feeling of guilt overcame him.  
This was all his fault.  
He was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he didn't even notice the dark figure move behind him in the mirror. Bond only looked up a fraction of a second before he felt an acute pain in the back of his head and the world went black around him.


End file.
